An object of this class encapsulates a passphrase hashed using the algorithm used by MySQL from version 3.23. This is a subclass of Authen::Passphrase, and this document assumes that the reader is familiar with the documentation for that class.

The MySQL v3.23 hash scheme is composed entirely of linear operations. It accepts an arbitrarily long passphrase, and ignores all space and tab characters. No salt is used. 62 bits of hash are generated. Each character influences only a minority of the result bits, so similar passphrases of the same length have noticeably similar hashes.

In MySQL the hash is represented as a string of sixteen lowercase hexadecimal digits.

Warning: This is not a serious cryptographic algorithm. Do not use for any security purpose.